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Page 1 of 2  I have been playing around with a variety of Media Centers lately. I started off with LinuxMCE and failed miserably. After a few different systems I settled on WinXP and GBPVR and was relatively happy for a while. I had a few features that refused to work right so it was not making me happy. I then saw a new LinuxMCE video and figured it was time to give it another attempt. After all, it had 2 updates and a major revision since I failed, it had to be better by now. This article shows my 2nd attempt at making LinuxMCE work.
First off I had about 6 hours of waiting to do. I had a shit-ton of movies and tv shows that Melissa would kill me over if I deleted, and the easy install DVD had very few download locations so I had to use a torrent. I got it in about 5 hours. (I found the ftp after the fact. D'oh!)
After everything was moved, downloaded and burned, it was time to get a energy drink and get this mofo installed.
Alrighty, the LinuxMCE website says this easy DVD lets me install the media center in 3 easy steps. I can handle that, so I kiss XP goodbye, (I do that every few months anyhow), and reboot with the shiny new all-in-one-you-are-gonna-love-this-install disc.
I see the pretty Kubuntu logo and then 3 seconds later I get this.
/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
Well fan-fucking-tastic. No less then 20 seconds into he install something is not right.
I looked over the LinuxMCE forums and the search gave me a total of "0" results. I started to download the standard Kubuntu/2cdLMC cds to do the alternate install. While waiting for those to come in I figured I would search Google a bit. I found lots of people bitching about this error. It usually seemed to boil down to a hard drive or IDE or SCSI issue so I yanked out some of my storage HD's and went with the DVD drive as master and a 250 gig HD as slave. Once I did this the machine started to install.
I was presented with a nice setup screen that asked me things like what screen resolution I wanted, and if I picked the wrong on accident it would fall back to default. I like it when errors fix themselves. My big screen tv is getting a DVI input form the computer so this took a few minutes to find the right setting.
Bonus points for this.
After I did the setup I had a new screen telling me things were going on and to wait. Then the dreaded "overlay not available" started popping up. I am using a Xtasy9200SE and by my reading it seemed like it should be fine. Well apparently it isn't. I was not a real big fan of the transparent menus anyhow, so I decided to fall back on UI2. To do this was remarkably simple. I was not real sure how to get back to the green setup screen, but there was a simple button for it on the screen I was looking at. It told me to reboot and I could re-setup my tv.
More bonus points.
I thought it was kinda silly I could not hit the admin web page still, so I did some snooping and realized it setup a IP totally outside of what my network addresses range.
Bugger. I am going to install it the normal way. The 3 click install DVD may sound good, but it does not fit my needs. I am also going to go buy a Nvidia card. The ATI card I have been fighting with is giving me grey hairs. The display is always off and I still cannot use anything but UI1, which looks like a turd.
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